Linux Blog

Going back to last weeks article on running things continuously, part of the use case was generating random numbers.

While using echo $RANDOM works, but it doesn’t work very well for having a minimum and max value. There are techniques to do this, but what I’ve found easier is to use another language of your choice and run that separately using expansion ( $() or “). I’m sure there is a way to do it in Ruby and Python and whatever language but since I’m familiar with PHP, I’ll use that in this example first:

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for i in `seq 1 10`; do
echo `php -r 'echo rand(1, 100);'`
done;

This example iterates the loop 10 times, and echo’s a random number between 1 and 100. here is more information on PHP’s random function Note that this does require having php5-cli package installed.

If you don’t have PHP, but have perl you can use:

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for i in `seq 1 10`; do
echo `perl 'print rand(100);'`
done;

That’s great and all, but perl uses what looks like floating numbers. To get an int, you have to cast to an int which adds additional typing:

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for i in `seq 1 10`; do
echo `perl 'print int(rand(100));'`
done;

To me, this is easier but, if you don’t have PHP, Perl, Ruby, Python or whatever your choice, you could use bash (I always forget how, but here it is for reference:)

echo $[ 1 + $[ RANDOM % 100 ]]

Or if you have complex requirements, you could write a quick binary that does the same thing. Another alternative is to use another shell that you do have access to that happens to have a more robust RNG.